While a nine-track, 30-minute-long album rarely begs for editing, what Timms has assembled here might have made better sense as an EP.

It's a disc in which Dizzee diz, lyrical wiz, is more forthright as lyricist, using the blank canvas of an "album" to sketch together a thoughtful, carefully-sequenced set in which his voice, and its elastic accent, ring clear.

The band doesn't quite manage to reconcile its mannered appropriation of a distanced, underground frigidity with its boisterous forays into abrasive, psych-tinged garage rock, but this is probably a good thing, because it's this resistance to homogeneity that gives them the sort of edge they'd otherwise lack.

It's basically more of the same sort of wistful, sometimes hard-charging melodic rock of the group's first and better release, Up the Bracket.

This disc may have a wilder sense of love-and-adventure about it, and may offer the thrills of an unpredictable ride, but, in its capriciousness and incongruousness, the thing Medulla rarely feels like is an album.

Utterly modern and utterly compelling.

Too much of Half Smiles of the Decomposed, however, does not rock.

A strong return to form.

Basic but gorgeously textured pop-rock with a country tinge, Rilo Kiley's music is led by vocals that'll stop you in your tracks.

Donelly shows a grace on this disc that a lot of people her age aren't capable of.

A collection of slow, sad, stately songs whose obvious studio smarts are dwarfed by a big bleeding folkie's heart.

Their inventive, experimental-leaning music dances through history, passing from blues to rock 'n' roll to pop to experimental to something uniquely theirs.

All those instrumental colorings are clearer, and the individual qualities of the voices in their choir shine through even when they're all belting it out together.

Transcendent and well-turned, Soft Commands is another exceptional recording from a talented, aware artist.

Out of the Shadow is a meandering musical path, but one well worth taking.

This is intense, serious music for serious times, and writing off Sparta as the "other," less interesting half of their previous group would be a major mistake.

If Foxtrot's songs were fractured pop, then Ghost is just plain fracture, a soft and brutal self-examination that pulls no punches even as it manages to remain carefully elliptical.

So while not breaking new ground -- a near impossible expectation given the amount of ground The Fall has already broken -- The Real New Fall LP is a strong indication that Mark E. Smith is nowhere near finished.

Aside from Riches' rich language, there's not much traditionalism on the album, it being more concerned with stumbling in melancholy fashion through murmured countryish balladry.

The most amazing power-pop album I've heard all year.

Once you get acclimatized to the torturous messages and the dynamic, diverse musical accompaniment shifts from song to song, it becomes obvious that Uh Huh Her is one of Harvey's most rewarding albums.

Seemingly taking its cue from Congleton's willfully bizarre screaming, the band favors atonalism and discordance in its cobbled-together brand of mighty-uptighty protest rock.

A funkdafied smart-bomb that's one part Brooklyn, one part Madchester, guitar-meets-echo-chamber, a little Kompakt but still a little sprawling.

Immersed in beautiful, stirring string arrangements, heartfelt melodies and an all-around warm and welcoming down-home folk feel, the new album is sincerely soothing.

By the time the longplayer finishes playing, you realize, whilst the acoustic guitars and harmonized vocals and that awesome table-tennis-ball-bouncing-beat may've made you think this was some easy-to-love pop platter, it actually hasn't stumbled all the way towards getting-it-together.

They combine the angular dread of Joy Division with the slow burn of the Velvet Underground (circa the third album), underpinned with some sinuous rock dynamics and topped off with laconic, sometimes languid vocals.

It's big but it's also clever.

Even the grand indulgence in artistic artifice on A Grand Don't Come For Free -- its self-contained narrative -- seems like it's forsaking a long shelf-life, the downside of the story's "mystery" being that, once you've heard the yarn once, it's a little like you've heard it all, and all it has to offer.